How the Indian government is keeping Rohingya out

By Omkar Khandekar
In August 2012, a family of seven from Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh, boarded a bus to the Indo-Bangladesh border. They planned on sneaking into India that night. They were Rohingya — an ethnic group of Myanmar’s Rakhine province.

There would be three separate groups of helpers, their dalal (facilitator) had told them over the phone. One would escort them to a Bangladeshi village near the border, another would take them across to West Bengal and t ..
“It was very scary,” recalled Maung Shwe (name changed), who now lives in a refugee camp in New Delhi. “I was thinking we would be killed that night.” Ten minutes later, they were in India and into yet another hut. The next evening, they boarded a taxi to Kolkata, then a train to New Delhi. “Come to think of it, it didn’t even seem like a border,” said Shwe. He hadn’t seen a fence, a wall or even security personnel. “All our guides were locals. They weren’t scared at all. They seemed used to thi ..